Puget’s performance is in stark contrast to the global PC market, which contracted 6% in the fourth quarter of last year, and plummeted 14% in the first quarter of 2013, according to research firm IDC.

Puget also went against the grain by selling significantly more Windows 7 PCs than ones equipped with the new Windows 8. That was not a strategy of its own choosing, however, as customers select the operating system for their custom-built machines.

Major OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Dell took a different tack, going almost exclusively with Windows 8 on new consumer PCs starting last October. The current retail channel remains predominantly Windows 8 territory. (The same OEMs continue to sell Windows 7 systems to business customers, however.)

How Windows 7 sales stack up at Puget

“For the first few months, demand [for Windows 8] slowly picked up, from virtually zero to about 30% of sales,” said Bach of the post-October 2012 launch. “But then it settled at about 20% of sales and has stayed around there since March.” Virtually all of the remainder—around 80% and holding steady—that Puget sells are powered by Windows 7.

The continued lure of Windows 7 didn’t surprise Bach, who, like most critics, said that the problems with Windows 8 made its 2009 predecessor seem all the more attractive.

“After having spent extended time with [Windows 8], I can understand many of our customer frustrations,” said Bach. “There isn’t anything that is a show-stopper in the UI [user interface], but it gets in its own way a lot of the time. I find myself thinking about the UI and how to use it to make it do what I want, which I think is the sign of a bad UI.”

Not surprisingly, given the sales share of Windows 8, few Puget customers have equipped their new PCs with touch-enabled displays, even those asking for Windows 8. Microsoft built Windows 8 with touch in mind—its tile-style “Modern” UI is tough to use without touch capabilities—and it and independent analysts have put some of the blame for slow sales on a lack of affordable touch PCs.

“We are not seeing a pickup in touch display interest,” said Bach. “I would expect touch to be of more interest with laptops and tablets. [But] our laptops are not touch-enabled, and yet our laptop sales were up 50% last month. Go figure.”

Bach realized his company’s performance was not representative of the computer industry as a whole. “It really should be no surprise that we aren’t following the volume PC industry,” Bach said. “We are a niche builder, with ASPs [average selling prices] probably 5-10x the industry average. High-performance computers are just a completely different animal.”

How long can Win 7 PCs be sold?

It’s still not clear how long system builders like Puget will be able to sell Windows 7 PCs. Although Microsoft has a policy that allows OEMs to pre-install the previous Windows edition on PCs for up to two years after a new version launches, Microsoft’s website, last updated in January 2012, doesn’t yet specify an “end-of-sale” date for Windows 7.

It’s possible—although Microsoft has not signaled such a move—that the Redmond, Wash. developer will extend that two-year sales period if Windows 8 continued to languish.

Bach plans to sell Windows 7 as long as possible.

“I haven’t heard a peep about an end-of-sales schedule for Windows 7,” Bach said when asked whether he’d received word about a cutoff from either Microsoft or his distributors. “But I also think that Windows 7 is going to be the next Windows XP. We’re going to find ourselves finding some odd way to install it on special request eight years from now.